House Offers To Cut Deficit By $273 Billion

WASHINGTON — Congressional budget negotiators considered Tuesday a new offer by House Democrats to reduce the federal deficit through additional cuts in domestic spending.

The proposal would split the difference in three-year savings between the House and Senate versions of the budget.

Without freezing Social Security benefits or increasing taxes, the new proposal claims to reduce the deficit by $273 billion over three years, roughly the halfway point between the Republican Senate's $295 billion and the Democratic House's $259 billion.

Despite this new proposal, the budget rhetoric remained pessimistic. A vote on the proposal may come today.

Earlier, Republican leaders met separately with Vice President George Bush and Donald Regan, the White House chief of staff.

Neither held out hope for an early compromise, though both recommended that negotiations should continue.

Regan said of the negotiators, ''They should try to talk this thing through.''

Bush said, ''I wouldn't look for waving a magic wand and having a lot of tough problems go away.''

Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas, the Republican majority leader, sought to put a special interpretation on Regan's words.

Dole said that the White House wants a budget that would preserve the $28 billion in deficit savings that would have been achieved by freezing the inflation allowance for Social Security and government pensions.

In this vein, Republicans continued to hint that the budget ''framework'' reached at the White House was too one-sided.

That framework proposed abandoning both the Social Security freeze and new taxes.

Speaker Tip O'Neill again indicated that he would not agree to any budget that changed Social Security benefits.

To some degree, the House Democrats' new proposal attempted to address some of those concerns, including the Republican claim that the House realizes too much of its savings in defense and not enough in domestic spending.

The House proposal retreats from a freeze on defense spending and offers $6 billion in additional budget authority.

Over three years, it would cut domestic programs like Superfund, the Small Business Administration and mass transit by an additional $24 billion.

The proposal would also terminate eight comparatively insignificant domestic programs.

The proposal seems to be the latest step of the budget conference in what is shaping up to be a drawn out process.